by Matthew Hay Brown

This morning, the Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee issued a report saying that the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking into account veterans care, market disruptions, foregone investments and the costs of borrowing, could exceed $3.5 trillion over the next decade.

Now the Republican members of the panel want them to take it back.

“It is disappointing that the Democrats would release a report that contains so many factual errors, but the errors are in keeping with its sloppiness and overtly political tone,” Sen. Sam Brownback and Rep. James H. Saxton, ranking Republicans on the committee, said this afternoon in a statement.

“All wars involve costs, and the war on terror is no exception,” they said. “The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly involve costs, but prematurely pulling out of these wars would also include huge costs that are ignored in the Democrats’ report. … We call on Senator Schumer and the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate to withdraw this defective report.”

War at any Price? The Total Economic Costs of the War Beyond the Federal Budget, released this morning by Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, says Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the United States $1.3 trillion through 2008 if the President Bush’s supplemental funding request is approved. The total climbs to $3.5 trillion by 2017 even if troops are drawn down by two-thirds in Iraq and one-third in Afghanistan, the report concludes.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called it “yet another reminder of how President Bush’s stubborn refusals to change course in Iraq – and Congressional Republicans’ willingness to rubberstamp his failed strategy – has real consequences at home for all Americans.”

But the Republican members of the panel, who say they were not consulted or notified before the report was released, dismissed it as “another thinly veiled exercise in political hyperbole masquerading as academic research.”

They were joined by Jim Nussle, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who called the report "an unfortunate example of the Congressional leadership attempting to manipulate economic data for public relations purposes."

Brownback and Saxton, in a rebuttal to the Democrats' report, question totals dervied from combining direct costs of the war with “mostly speculative and generally model-free estimates of costs associated with factors such as debt financing” and “guesses about the extent to which increases in global energy prices in recent years could be tied to the conflicts.”

And they said the Democrats ignored “that there are indeed benefits from curbing terrorism.”

Of course, whether the war in Iraq has curbed terrorism is a matter of ongoing debate. But the GOP critique echoed concerns raised by others.

Former National Security Council staffer Robert D. Hormats, author of The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars, questioned the report’s assumptions about the impact of the war on oil prices and American investment in today’s Washington Post.

“The wars will cost a lot more than the appropriated sums, and it’s certainly true our children will be paying for this for a long, long time,” he said. “I’m very critical of the way they have financed the war, but I always hesitate to try to quantify any of these things, to make these numerical judgments.”

The JEC's leaders stand by the report.

"Instead of dealing with the substance of this report, the White House is once again trying to deflect attention away from the costs of this war in Iraq,'' Israel Klein, spokesman for the JEC, said this evening. "This report uses the non-partisan CBO budget estimates and was prepared by the JEC's professional economists using the same process this committee has always used, regardless of which party is in the majority."